Sunlight's Shadow
by Lindir's Ghost
Summary: When a distress call pulls the Doctor and Rose into Nazi Germany, they find themselves pitted against a man of ruthless ambition, Hell-bent on changing the course of History. It's 1941, and Time is running out. Ten/Rose
1. Prologue

_Sunlight's Shadow_

Prologue

_To die, to sleep,_

_No more; and by sleep say we end_

_The heartache and the thousand natural shocks _

_That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation _

_Devoutly to be wisht. To die – to sleep – _

_To sleep! Perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub;_

_For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,_

_When we have shuffled off this mortal coil_

_Must give us pause: there's the respect _

_That makes calamity of so long life._

_**Hamlet**_, Act III, Scene I

William Shakespeare

--(0)--

Itzak Baldyga's centre of balance lulled with the motion of the car. His feet shuffled a little wider, resisting the drag of gravity as the train listed through a bend in the track. His hands tucked into his coat sleeves, vainly attempting to warm themselves against his forearms, yet only serving to pull the heat from there and turn it into nothing. It was as though warmth was banned in the swaying cars, seeping through to the front of the train, where the SS sat in comfort and warmth, soaking up the misery of the people behind them and drinking it down with shots of brandy.

"It is God's plan," one of his comrades affirmed to the others, nodding his head in his certainty. "It's a test of our faith. God is looking for the best of us." The man rubbed his hands together a little more vigorously, as though the action would validate his words and make him ready to successfully complete the task. Baldyga said nothing. It would help no-one if he voiced his own belief that God had forsaken them all.

"I heard that they are moving us on to a colony."

Baldyga turned half an attentive ear to the new theory.

"A colony? Where?" Eagerness now, clutching to the new idea like a promise.

"Beyond the German state, away from the new empire. Exclusively for Jews."

_If that was true_, Baldyga thought to himself, _then we would be going to Israel._

"But I'm a German," one man claimed, his protest billowing from his lips to disappear in a fine mist. "My place is in Germany, in my shop, not some colony on a spit of land no man wants to claim."

"Tell that to the SS," his friend scoffed. "See if they listen, and then come back and tell us the result!" A rumble of laughter met the remark in the air between them and danced with it for a moment.

"Anyway, you're not a German, you're a Jew."

"No, I'm a German-Jew."

"Not any more, you're not. Where have you been these past years, Letzg?"

"Asleep!" someone jibed. Another run of laughter. Baldyga remembered fleetingly the little shop Letzg had had. Shoes, he recalled. And there was the image of the slightly older man nestled in the memory, slumped behind the counter and shrouded in snores.

The wind whistled through the slats of the cattle car, screaming over every inch of bare skin, through every partially parted cloth. The company wrapped themselves tighter, huddling and showing their backs to the blasts of cold, as if doing so could fend it off. In truth, nothing could fend off the cold, in either respect. _Unwelcome_ was all Baldyga could glean from the little sense he had managed to make from the past few years. _You can be anywhere but here_. But the problem, Baldyga knew, was that there was not even an _anywhere_ for them. Not any more.

Silence for a time, each man contemplating the possibility of a colony, and daring himself to believe in such a gleaming idea that was so heavily contradicted by the cattle car they travelled in. Then the silence was ruptured with a very different theory. "I heard the Germans have extermination bases."

Silence again, only this time it was stunned, an animal knocked down. Surprised eyes pinned the speaker, and he shuffled under their stare, but did not turn away. A man to Baldyga's right eventually shrugged off the heavy weight of shock from his shoulders. "Don't be a fool," he scoffed, straightening his back and fixing the other with a condemning eye. "They wouldn't do that. This is 1941, not the Dark Ages! Think of the cost!"

Baldyga's brow shrugged at the man's belief that economy alone could be a reason against mass murder.

"And besides," the man continued, "they need us for the war effort. Who will make the shells, the pots, the uniforms?"

"The women."

Silence again.

"That is what the English are doing."

"What?" Slight panic now. "Killing the Jews?"

"What-? _No_, you idiot! Working their women in the factories!"

One of the others suddenly started to laugh, an unsure, lonely sound that was not joined by any one else. "It cannot be true. It can't! Poldek is right, listen to him. They couldn't get rid of us, think of the impracticalities." Again, that theory of inconvenience. "It's a story to frighten the boys. Nothing more than that. We are all fools for even allowing it thought."

A murmur of agreement rang through them, but it was unsure of itself.

Such rumours always manage to take some form of truth when fear lays open a man's soul, leaving bare all of his darkest places and offering him no solace. As such, the men surrounding Rabbi Schmidt hoped to discover some hiding place behind the older man's words as he sought to offer them comfort from the Torah. But Itzak Baldyga struggled to uncover the power behind the teachings. He could not bear to take to heart the preachings of a man whose eyes were so very lost.

"But look at us." The words piled out of a short and balding man, his fright and damning belief in the darkest of the rumours drawing his face. "We are, none of us, young men!"

"_He _is a young man."

The group shuffled as one to look at the 'young man'. There was indeed a younger man, a _much_ younger man. He was not of them, this man; he was thin, but in compliance with his build, not through meagre diet. His clothes were nothing like the tattered shadows the other men wore. He was certainly not Jewish, not with _that_ hairstyle. But the real difference, the really _prominent_ difference, was that he was chained. Heavy shackles held his wrists up from his body, elevating them from his lap as his body sloped into the dirty corner. He leaned his forehead into the wood, paying absolutely no heed to their conversation, or their mention of him and sudden attention. But Baldyga also noted, with concern, his too-white skin, visible in the dank light and from all the way at the other end of the car. _And his eyes_, he thought, _belong to a broken man._

The first time he had seen him was some hours ago, a fleeting glimpse from his line, a streaking outline of a man, chased by blackness and guns. He had gotten on the wrong side of Lieutenant Hermann. No-one got on the wrong side of Lieutenant Hermann… And then he had been here, unconscious at first, then awake and distant. No struggle against the chains, no hand to the split skin at his temple. Nothing. _Broken_.

"He is different," Poldek observed, stating the obvious for sheer wont of something to say that drew back from the unsettling conversation of seconds ago. The stranger provided a comfortable focus. "Perhaps a resistance fighter, if they think he needs chains. Just another toy for the SS to practice on. A dead man."

"Ack, Poldek, keep your voice down!"

"For what?" Poldek asked, shrugging his shoulders against the protest. "He knows it, look at him! He hasn't so much as twitched for hours."

"I wonder if he isn't hurt," Baldyga wondered out loud, speaking for the first time in hours. His throat certainly knew it; it felt as though dryness gripped it in a clamp.

"Why? What could you do about it if he is?" Poldek pressed relentlessly. "Besides, he is not of us, you don't know what he did to be here."

"He tried to save the Pereira girl, that's what he did!" Baldyga snapped, pushed to his limit by Poldek's ridiculous statements. "He tried, and he got caught. Every man deserves help, even in the smallest way … particularly following such an act."

Poldek threw up his hands. "Fine, Itzak, if that's what you think, no-one's stopping you."

With a parting glare cast at Poldek, Baldyga's feet lead him towards the fellow, his hand skirting the black wood as the car tipped and juddered over different track. The others watched his back, but he gave them no care. The stranger did not look up at his approach, but gave a start when the older man's hand lighted upon his shoulder. The dark eyes lifted to his visitor's face, dulled surprise quickly fading into something less than indifference.

"Might I speak with you, friend?"

The man did not reply, but no objection came from him either, so Baldyga took it upon himself to sit opposite him, tucking his legs under his cold behind. He listened to the other's breathing for a moment, noting the shallowness and slight panting. "Something pains your chest?"

"It's nothing." His voice came as a soft, heavy croak. The action of talking evidently hurt, because his eyes registered it. The sign did not stay long, however, as though the pain was dismissed as irrelevant. "It doesn't matter, anyway."

"I think it does," replied Baldyga, his eyes sighting the darkened stain and tear in the coat. "And it would be against my oath to see _that_ and pay it no attention."

The man's brow peaked briefly in interest. "You're a doctor," he confirmed, more to himself than Baldyga.

"I _was_," the older man stated, kneeling and shifting the other's coat aside to make his inspection. "The law forbids me to practice now." His blue eyes widened in surprise at his discovery under the swathes of material. "This is an exit wound!"

The man nodded, leaning his head back against the grime of the wood and staring right through it, as though he looked passed a window. "It doesn't matter, not any more."

"Doesn't matter?"

"There are more important things happening right now than me." The stranger started to cough into his collar, his face straining under the effort to keep the fit under control and, Baldyga felt, to harness the pain it caused. He pressed his hand to the other's shoulder supportingly, noting the blood touching the corners of the mouth and mottling the tan material with stark darkness.

"Well," remarked Baldyga, incredulity snagging in his tone, "to me, right now, you are the most important thing – certainly the most _interesting_ thing I have come across in an age!" _You should be dead, at least dying. _For a man to cough up blood like that, coupled with an exit wound in that position of the chest marked a collapsed lung, most definitely. The chest cavity would be filling with fluid. Survival for such an extensive injury should be minimal, at best. Yet, here this character was, alive after hours of trauma, perfectly lucid and breathing on his own. Baldyga pressed his fingers over the man's pulse, further surprised by the double flutter. He raised his brows in askance, needing the other to confirm what he had found as truth and not an error on his half.

The man registered the look he was being given, and the bloodied corner of his mouth tipped, just for a moment. "I have a very interesting physiology."

"Ha! You don't say!" Baldyga leaned back on his haunches, an action he instantly regretted as the car listed again. His face smoothed as he told the stranger: "I have no medicines to make you more comfortable with. I can't even offer you water."

Again, those words. "It doesn't matter." He shifted slightly, wincing at the action. "They would kill me anyway, your painkillers. Anaphylactic," he stated, as though he divulged a great secret and clearly not taking his own condition very seriously.

Itzak Baldyga observed the man for a moment, swaying steadily with the lull of the car and half expecting this medical mystery he had stumbled upon to die at his feet. The stranger did not hold Baldyga's analytical gaze for long, his eyes drifting back through the blackened wood with a resonating, despairing acceptance.

"Have you a name, sir?"

The man's eyes pulled back to Baldyga again, this time searching _him_ for something. He had never seen such deep eyes… "John Smith," he stated, after considering the question for a longer time than was normally deemed necessary for a name.

"Oh, really? Very English."

The man almost snorted. "Yes, quite so. Quite so…"

"Might I call you John?"

The eyes of the man named John Smith flickered in amusement, though the reason for the reaction lay beyond Baldyga's comprehension. "Yes, if you like. In exchange for your name, of course."

"Itzak Baldyga."

"Hello, Itzak Baldyga; I'd shake your hand, which I think tends to be the custom in moments like this, 'cept I'm a bit – well…" he gave the heavy shackles a cursorily glance.

Despite the situation, Baldyga found himself revering the company of this complete stranger. He had, of course, met strangers on trains before, except not quite under such ridiculously contorted circumstances. He allowed the companionable silence that had managed to steal in and settle itself between them stretch, just for a while. It was bizarre to him how comfortable he felt, conversing with this man, despite the odd air he exuberated about him. There was something of wonder and adventure to him, a chaotic and rash figure of a man: after all, no man of the Ghetto would ever consider drawing such attention to themselves by snatching a child right from under the noses of the SS. But all of that power and ability was somehow crushed, shattered by some enormous load.

"What have you burdened yourself with, my friend?" Baldyga asked quietly. "From where does this defeat come?"

The size of the pain that flamed across John Smith's features was unfathomable. He made to speak, then closed his mouth and swallowed. He tried again, though Baldyga would later think that the success of the action was limited. "I'm like a cancer." Bitterness seeped through, an irrevocable rage at himself shuddering the voice. "Every person I touch turns to dust in my fingers." An angered tear escaped, and he rubbed it furiously away on his shoulder.

"It must be lonely," Baldyga observed quietly, "thinking of yourself in that light all the time."

"It's the truth," John responded, unable to stem the tears and evidently enraged at himself for having allowed them in the first place, a snarl encapsulating his own self loathing. "And she's gone, and it's all my fault."

"Who?" Baldyga pressed gently. "Who's gone?"

The reddened eyes lifted to fix with grey. The young face looked as though it might crumble to dust through sheerest agony. "Rose."


	2. Chapter One: Doing the Domestic

Chapter One – Doing the Domestic

_Two Weeks Earlier…_

It was the rain that woke him. That gentle, constant patter against the glass stirring his subconscious. It reminded him of something, something recent. The memory tried to make him listen with a persistent stream of images emerging from the cloud of sleep. _Rain… I wanted to show her the rain. Rain. Africa. Elephants… The lioness. The Incubus-_

His eyes opened, his chest clenching as total recollection took the place of the broken links. The scene that greeted him threw him, at first. A darkened room, presenting him with the vague shapes of a sofa and glass coffee table, and a large television in the corner. Jackie's lounge. He wondered how he had gotten there, and then remembered the previous day, agreeing with Rose – quite possibly for the first time in his life – that going to see her mother was absolutely a _Good Idea_. There had been tea, and chin wag between the two women, and he had nestled himself into the very armchair he was in now… There was no recollection of falling asleep. The last thing he was aware of, was hearing Jackie battering on about some cleaner called Greg and … what was it? A ginger baby? No, not a ginger baby … something to do with babies. Or so he thought. Not that it really mattered, anyway.

The Doctor looked down – and frowned. He was – very comfortably, he had to admit – oh, what was the right word? Snuggled, he decided, fitted the bill rather aptly. He was 'snuggled' beneath a very heavy duvet with Winnie the Pooh smiling at a pot of hunny cradled against his stomach. And there was a pillow supporting his head. He must have been in a really deep sleep to have been shifted forward without noticing. _And to have my shoes taken off_, he noted to himself as he became aware of his trainer-free feet.

Not that he hadn't needed it. Despite the grogginess of waking, he really did feel so much better. 'A bit of a kip', indeed. He'd been asleep for nearly thirteen hours, which far surpassed Rose on a Saturday…

The Doctor stretched, rolling his bunched muscles and relishing the more than satisfying sensation of the fibres readjusting and his shoulders cracking. Rising from the chair, deciding that he had most definitely slept enough, he realised that, by the authority of Greenwich Mean Time, time had pushed on. It was eight o'clock, and, to make it worse, a Saturday.

_Wonderful._

Rose loved Saturdays. As far as she was concerned, they were like the Sabbath, to be regarded with the utmost respect. _Thou shalt not arise before ten_. He had tried to get her up early on a Saturday, once. He thought that visiting the Alsar Spoorn cluster at five in the morning - Rose Tyler Time - was a magnificent idea. Rose had, to phrase it politely, disagreed, and ensured that he was aware of his error of judgement. That had only been a couple of months ago...

And he was forced to acknowledge that, while Rose and Jackie were both very different people, they both had a strikingly similar attitude towards their weekends. He was doomed to spend at least another two hours on his lonesome. Going outside was not an option, as Jackie's front door had taken to groaning, as if the damned thing had the weight of the universe hanging from its hinges. He rather liked this body, and he anticipated, rather astutely, that the two Tylers would be unlikely to allow him to continue his enjoyment of it if he woke them from their revered slumber.

But inactivity was something that the Doctor generally didn't do so well in. He was not prone to sitting around and waiting for anything in his life, and the universe did not tend to allow him such leisure, anyway. Sleeping for hours on end, while not unknown to him, and only tending to be the result of extreme exhaustion, inevitably lead to his body waking with a pushing buzz of pent-up energy. He felt wired like an erratic cyborg, and the need to propel himself into some activity or other pushed him to look around himself for something constructive to engage in. His eyes lighted upon Jackie's copy of _The Times_, and a slow grin wormed its way across his features. The paper was an old edition, but that did not phase him in the slightest as he ruffled his way through to the crossword. Jackie hadn't even looked at it. _Brilliant!_

He told himself that he would pace his mind. There were a potential two hours to kill, after all. Five minutes later, and he huffed, chewing the pen of his veritable mother-in-law through sheer annoyance and scowling at both the offending completed puzzle and Fern Britton's now blue-toothed smile, looking up at him from the page through a brand new pair of Doodle Specs. Free of charge. The biro split as he rolled it through his teeth in frustration, the sudden hairline fissure managing to snag his tongue and make him lurch gracelessly in surprise, spitting the offending piece of plastic out onto the floor.

The Doctor left his seat, the movement agitated and his mood made slightly worse by standing awkwardly on the discarded pen. He picked it up, offering it all sorts of torturous promises concerning, amongst other things, the dissection and imaginative reassembly of its components, just as soon as he dared use his sonic screwdriver. He found himself wandering into the kitchen with it, making sure that it was fully aware that he was considering melting it over the gas – and that's where it hit him. He wanted to kill time. What better way to kill time than to cook?

He was relatively good at cooking, when he did it. Rose never complained, anyway. And he was a dab hand when it came to bacon butties… The Doctor shed his crumpled shirt in favour of the blue T shirt underneath, flicked the kettle on and set about raiding the cupboards. If he was going to work, he needed a good cuppa to see him through…

--(0)--

She could hear talking. A great deal of it, actually, and vastly one-sided. His voice drifted through the wood of her door, the enthusiasm for whatever it was he conversed in curbing round the contours of the flat. Was he talking to her mother? He had to be talking to her mother. Hadn't he? If not, he was engaging himself in rather animated conversation. The last option, she decided with a disturbed sigh, was not beyond him, and was the most likely. Oddly, however, it was not the talking that had roused her from sleep. She could smell cooking. Was that bacon? And … pancakes?

Rose disengaged herself from the apparent battle she had been pulled into with her duvet, shuffling a pair of slippers on and opening her door silently, taking herself through the flat to find her mother standing just outside the kitchen. Jackie leaned against the doorframe, her lilac dressing gown wrapped tightly around herself in the chill of the February morning. She jerked her head wordlessly at Rose to come and join her. That smirk on her face said more than a thousand words…

Rose crossed her arms in a vague attempt at warding off the cold, frowning heavily under her mass of tousled bed hair as she joined her mother – and stared.

The Doctor was surrounded by plates piled with pancakes and bacon butties, thickly sliced bread practically crushing the encased bacon under its sheer density. _Talk about doorstop_. Wedges of lemon sat neatly on a side plate, ready and waiting serenely to be juiced amidst what could only be described as kitchen carnage. Flour paled the counter in spots, making it look as though it had spawned some kind of fungal infection. Dribbles of milk made an odd-looking kind of paste where he had managed to scuff plates and God knew what else through the varying splodges. Pancake mix dribbled over the front of the cooker. Somehow, miraculously, the Doctor stood in the midst, utterly unscathed, his tie round his head like some rudimentary sweatband, as though he was pretending he was Marco Pierre White. Not even a hint of flour … and he was completely unaware of their presence at his back as he tended what seemed to be the last of the pancakes over the hob…

"… _Eggs, milk and flour, pancake power,_

_Look at his milky yellow sunshine face._

_Flip it now, flip it good - OO!_"

The Doctor tossed the pancake artfully, catching it squarely in the pan with a method that had blatantly been perfected within the past half hour, if the pancake in the corner of the floor was anything to go by, left slouched against the unit like a forgotten soldier.

"_Flip it now, flip it good – OO!_

_Some are salt,_

_Some are sweet,_

_Some are fruit,_

_Some are meat!_"

Rose bit down on her fist to calm the threatening tremors. Jackie wasn't faring that much better. The Doctor stopped his rendition of The Mighty Boosh's pancake song as he slipped the finished item onto the pile, and evidently started searching for something amongst the mess, piping up with an entirely new solo that, oddly enough, crashed Rose through a wall of maturity headlong into a forgotten part of her childhood.

"_It's very, very funny,_

'_Cos I know I had some honey;_

'_Cos it had the label on,_

_ Saying HUNNY._

His questing hand found the jar on the counter, attempting to hide from him behind the crumpled red bag of plain flour.

"_A goloptious full-up pot too,_

_And I don't know where it's got to,_

_No, I don't know where it's gone –_

_ Well, it's funny._"

Without so much as a pause, he dipped his fingers in, slathering them in amber and rambling on all the while… "I love honey, runny, yummy honey. Runny is as honey does," continuing to hum as he pushed his fingers into his mouth, his face twisting in purest ecstasy and his body with it, spinning to face the kitchen at large. He opened his eyes – and froze.

Silence stretched between them, both women fighting with themselves to quell the threatening laughter, and the Doctor looking from one to the other, a rabbit in the figurative headlights. An amber trail peeled down his hand.

Their spluttering hysterics practically ripped the silence – and the tattered remnants of the Doctor's dignity – into shreds. Jackie staggered away into the living room, finding herself unable to look at him anymore, choking out something about suffering a hernia. His fingers were still in his mouth, as though afraid of emerging into what had startlingly been turned into an embarrassing situation. Eventually, he stretched to attempting to talk around his digits. "Um… 'ey wav 'usft -" He finally removed his fingers, giving them a quick lick as Rose straightened herself up finally to look at him through the tears. "I was just … erm … making breakfast," he tried to justify with a sticky voice, glancing shyly at the surrounding mess as though it had just crept up on him whilst he had been distracted.

"So we see." Rose passed by him to the counter crammed with plates, offering him a fond pat on the arm and taking up the sandwiches and pancakes. "C'mon. You can bring the lemon and sugar. And the honey, I suppose."

The Doctor stood for a moment, looking at her and rubbing the back of his neck with his non-honey hand. He wanted to ask her something, she deduced, and felt the tiniest hint of impatience when he did not come right out and say it. "What's the matter?"

He hesitated, mouthing wordlessly, until he finally managed to push the words from his mouth. "How – how long were you and Jackie, you know, standing there …?"

Rose smirked. "_Eggs milk and flour, pancake power_ is when I came in. Don't know about Mum, but she was here before me."

"Oh," he murmured, nodding is head absently. "'Kay then…"

"Oi!" Jackie struck up indignantly from the next room, unseen but by no means forgotten. "I was saving that crossword!"

"When for, the next Stone Age? You'll still be around, I suppose," he added as a sideline under his breath.

Rose gave him a reproachful look as she headed for the dining table, laden with the fruits of his 'work'.

"What?"

--(0)--

As much as he fussed and groaned about her, he really had become quite fond of Jackie Tyler, and she, him … an interesting turn out, considering she had loathed him for the first few months of their tenuous relationship. He had a feeling it was mainly to do with his current body. While he was quicker to temper than he used to be, and far more erratic, he found that there were much softer sides to him behind the sharp edges that his enemies encountered. And the dreaded Domestic did not strike the fear of God into him anymore, either. The travelling life was definitely his calling, and he could never see himself settling down and choosing the carpets he so hated, but he really didn't mind spending time with his companion's family. He accepted Rose's strong relationship with her mother, and while he would gripe and whinge when she requested to go home for a spell, the griping and whinging was never heartfelt. His ninth self had genuinely loathed visiting Jackie Tyler, had detested the very human grounding that family provided, visiting the mother and the idiot then-boyfriend. He regretted that now, appreciating that it was quite possible that the unrelenting attitude must have been quite hurtful to Rose.

Still. Not anymore.

When they eventually left the Powell Estate (following a great deal of cleaning, on his part), the Doctor allowed Rose to take her time saying goodbye to her mother. In fact, it had been she that suggested they head back to the TARDIS. Jackie, while not too thrilled by the idea of them leaving her on her own again, appreciated that her daughter had the entire of Time and Space at her disposal, and that they had stayed over night, a very rare event … and she also appreciated the fact that the Doctor had made breakfast, the level of generated mess left aside.

"Now you take care of yourself, d'y'hear?" she clucked, hands on either side of his face and a heavy maternal glint in her eye. "I don't want you comin' back here half dead again, alright?"

"You know, Jackie," the Doctor managed between a barrage of kisses, "I am over nine hundred years old. I'm a big boy, now."

"Funny," she shot back, "from what I saw earlier, I'd say you were about twelve." She gave him a beaming smile as he attempted to scowl, the expression loosing any weight with the slight colouring of his cheeks.

Rose couldn't help the irrepressible smile at the exchange between the pair. She remembered all too well the time when her mother had slapped him. Hard. Now, despite the jesting and the occasional sniping remark – from both sides – Jackie had grown to actually _care_ about the man who had whisked her daughter away from her. Funny thing, trust…

A final goodbye, and then a warm hello. The TARDIS doors swung shut behind them, and in under a minute, the cobalt box was surrounded not by ceaseless concrete and rubbish bins, but the depth of Time and Space, cocooning them in a sheath of possibilities and promises. Despite his previous itch to get his head into something, the Doctor's usual go-get attitude lacked its trademark enthusiasm. Rose sidled up to his shoulder as he reclined in the jump seat, feet crossed over the lip of the console. A pen lid he had found in his pocket had become the latest victim of his oral fixation, tipping gently between his teeth but no less scarred. But there was an introspective glaze in his eye, and she never liked it when he looked into himself, especially now. She _knew_ what shadows lay in his head.

"You're quiet," she observed, bumping her hip against him gently. _I hate it when you're quiet._

His face lifted to hers, and he regarded her for a time, his softened gaze inspecting her own. He could see it in her, that shade of worry lacing the skin at her lips and eyes in a fine net. She tried to shield it from him, but the openness of her heart was always her reliable betrayer. _Oh, Rosie-Rose. I'm sorry. _The events of the past days were still fresh on them both, that intimacy they had shared spanning beyond the claws of a simple evil. She knew him now, and he would never be able to shut her out. _I shouldn't have shut her out in the first place. _The pen lid flicked to the corner of his mouth so that he could make his answer. "I was thinking it was time for a bit of a jog."

She sighed inwardly, but decided to play up to him. "You sure you can actually run? Y'know, after that _tiny_ breakfast you had, I'm amazed you've got the energy…" The quip was an irresistible cherry. Honestly, she didn't know how someone of such slight build could fit twelve pancakes and two bacon butties in their stomach.

"I was hungry! And I make good pancakes, if I may say so myself…"

"Oh, absolutely," she agreed, nodding her head condescendingly. "_So_ good it's a wonder people don't sing about 'em…"

"I didn't write the song," he defended, a little petulance snagging his tone, though the light of play shone in his eyes all the same. "And you can't deny the sheer brilliance of Winnie the Pooh, either. Anyway, there are more pressing matters at hand than my singing." A touch of gravity tilted his tone, and his eyes became that little bit darker. Reading her, as he was so very good at doing. "You're thinking that I'm thinking about that thing that you saw in my head."

"And are you?"

"Yes." He couldn't shield her from it anymore, she had seen with her own eyes. She knew his nightmares were made of her.

Rose hesitated, fighting with herself to push the words into the air between them and not have them hiding in her anymore. "It's just … it was scary, you know? And I can't stop thinking, it's still in your head, all the time. All those people, and…" _Me_.

He stood up, taking her hands and pulling her into a gentle hug. She breathed in the scent of him, feeling the press of his burden and the steady flutter of his hearts under her cheek. "Oh, Rose," he sighed, smoothing her hair. "I wish you'd never seen any of it."

"Is it such a bad thing that I _did_ see it, though?" She pulled back from the embrace, searching his face and finding herself resenting the way he tried to shift the reason behind their conversation onto her. "Is it such a bad thing that I know, Doctor?"

For the first time in a very, _very_ long time, he couldn't answer her. He _wanted_ to say that it helped him. In spite of everything they had gone through together, he had revealed so very little of himself to her. And now, she had seen into him. Rose Tyler had walked the haunted roads of his nightmares and stood up to his own fears. She had held him and shown such an incredible level of strength. She had not paled at the dying version of herself that the darkest of nights threw at him, but had stared _his_ fear down. She had given him the strength to fight back. But then, she had always been strong…

"Rose -"

The lighting balked red and the TARDIS practically screamed at him, both ringing the air around them and zipping alarm through his telepathic connection with her. He released himself from Rose in a heartbeat, pulling the monitor to round. "Distress signal," he threw at her, raising his voice above the harsh siren. "Hold on!" He practically lunged the ship down the co-ordinates, clamping down a lever with one foot and speeding his fingers over control switches.

When the TARDIS eventually landed, the jarring impact was enough to throw them both over. The Doctor didn't stay grounded long, hauling himself from the grilling and lifting Rose from her crumpled position, barely pausing with his quick "Are you alright?"

"Fine," Rose managed as he pulled her to the doors.

They stepped out onto a narrow street. The summer sun smiled down on them in what should be a beautiful afternoon. But, even as his feet made those first steps on the road, the Doctor's senses stirred uncomfortably. Every hair stood on end, and his teeth itched. Something was very definitely wrong with this place…

In the next street, the rumbling of a cheering crowd and a band, playing something that struck up dangerous images in his head –

"Doctor…"

He looked to her, and saw that she pointed at one of the houses. He followed her finger, and swallowed dryly.

It wafted lazily in the wind, suspended from the window like it was the most natural thing in the world, a great cloth of red and white and black. There were others like it, colouring the front of every house. But it wasn't the colour that made their hands reach out to hold one another, or the fact that the flag was emblazoned with uniform neatness on every house. It was that emblem, stark and jagged on a white circle, dead centre in a wash of red. The Nazi swastika seemed to grin at them from every angle, laughing at their knowledge of its meaning as it bathed them in its shadow.


End file.
